My Other Colorado Adventure

Last week, Cindy and I went on vacation to Colorado. We climbed Mt. Democrat. We stayed in an awesome bed-and-breakfast. We clambered and explored in Eleven Mile Canyon. We hung out with Cindy's brother Kevin and his wife Jessie, and Cindy's high-school friend Kristy and husband Ryan. It was a great week in which we occasionally wore jackets while our mid-western friends and family sweltered in temperatures topping 100.

I hesitated at first, however, to share this other story, but I have decided it's too good to miss.

Our story begins late last Sunday evening. We pulled up in front of Kevin and Jessie's house in Colorado Springs, where we were staying. It was late at night and we were both tired. I parked by the side of the road, with Cindy's passenger door directly over a drainage grate. (In hindsight, this should probably have been avoided.) Cindy gathered a large armful of various items that needed to go inside the house, and opened her door. Her phone was held loosely under one finger. When she moved to get out of the car - alas! - the phone slipped from her fingers, and she watched in horror as it fell neatly between the bars of the drainage grate and out of sight into the sewers below. She was understandably distraught - not, you understand, because she is one of these loathsome, execrable girls who experience withdrawal symptoms if prevented from texting for over ten minutes. No, her dismay was rather due to the fact that she's nowhere close to a renewal of contract, and there is no insurance on the phone; so we were looking at paying full retail price for a replacement phone. If you have ever been faced with a broken or lost phone, you know that these so-called "full retail prices" are set by servants of Sauron just after undergoing a root canal.

So, I grabbed a flashlight and checked out the drainage grate. To my dismay, the phone was far below in a large drainage tunnel about fifteen feet in diameter. It was lying on moist concrete out of the small stream of water, but it was definitely out of reach. The drainage grate was concreted into the street and wouldn't budge. Kevin came out and helped me take stock of things. There was a manhole in the middle of the street. We reasoned that this manhole might connect to the tunnel twenty feet away, so we got a crowbar and lifted the lid. Unfortunately, the ladder of the manhole just led down to a tiny drainage tube that undoubtedly led to the tunnel we sought, but was inaccessible to anyone larger than a marmot.

At this point, we gave up and went to bed.

On Monday morning, I went to the Verizon store, and was essentially told, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." The full retail price in question was $399. And no, they don't package it in a solid gold box for that price. I left the store thinking vague thoughts of Ebay or armed robbery.

When I got back to the house, I looked through the grate again and saw the phone lying there forlornly, the battery cover off to one side. I noted the direction of the water's flow, started looking at the lay of the land and absently got into my car and drove around the block to find the next drainage grate downstream. It was equally inaccessible. I kept circling, headed gradually downhill. About a half mile down the hill, there was a creek with high concreted retaining walls on both sides. I strolled up and down, looking for the tunnel. This I found after some searching. I clambered down the muddy wall with the aid of a random tree that was growing nearby.

Then I approached the mouth of the tunnel. My phone has an LED camera flash on it that can be used as a flashlight, so I turned it on and looked uneasily into the inky depths of the tunnel's concrete-and-corrugated-steel maw. I checked the sky - just some distant wispy clouds with nothing really threatening-looking as far as flash floods - and started walking. In my ears were echoing the dire warnings of my parents about drainage tunnels. I ignored them and kept walking. I counted my paces from the entrance. The tunnel made a slight bend about fifty paces in, and then all daylight was gone. I started picturing scenes from several movies. I kept walking upstream and counting paces, reasoning that I would recognize the look of the tunnel under where our car was parked from my careful examinations on the surface. The tunnel never divided, and the various bends seemed to coincide with my surface explorations, so I kept walking. Occasionally there would be glimpses of daylight from a drainage pipe coming in from the sides. After 800 paces (which I estimate at about a third of a mile), I came to a place where striped sunlight was streaming straight down onto a cell phone. I picked it up and examined it. It didn't seem damaged, and it hadn't been lying in the water. I pressed the power button and got nothing, but I remembered that the battery had been low the night before. So I turned and headed back downstream. I didn't bother counting paces this time, since the tunnel had never divided and I reasoned that all I had to do was go downstream. After walking for some time, I started regretting my decision not to count paces - the blackness started creeping up behind me a bit and I heard lots of critters scuttling in the darkness. My weak little camera-flash beam showed me about ten or fifteen feet of tunnel behind me - just enough to help indistinct shapes look scarier. But to my relief, a few minutes later I rounded the final bend and saw daylight ahead. Then all I had to do was climb back up the wall, come out on the sidewalk, and nod politely to a bemused jogger who happened along at that moment.

I drove back to the house, and presented the phone to Cindy with a flourish. With trepidation, we plugged the phone into its charger. It booted up and worked perfectly. At this moment, I experienced one of those moments of manly triumph that one experiences sometimes. I felt like a HERO OF NORSE LEGEND.

Now I know this was a rather stupid thing to do. I know I'm setting a bad example for any foolish minors who might be reading this. But for $400 (or even the $200-250 it would have cost to buy a used replacement phone on Ebay), I would probably do it again... after carefully checking the weather report.

MainStreet Worship

In the last post, I talked about this new worship service we're starting. (Read that post to get caught up if you need to... Done? Okay, let's continue.)

One very important question to me in approaching this project was, what can we do to make the experience less of a concert/lecture feel and more like something you actually get into? (Especially since a theater naturally lends itself to concert/lecture just by its architecture...) My friend Dwain, who I believe would consider himself agnostic as far as religious belief, once attended one of our services and wrote up a very valuable critique of it from his perspective. One of his observations was an astute question on preaching: "Wouldn’t it be more productive to enter into a dialogue with the community?" That question has stuck with me, because I agree. (Obviously we try to do exactly that in small-group settings, and that's one reason we believe in small groups so strongly. We also try - with varying degrees of success - to promote a small-group culture where honest questions are welcomed and not greeted with fear and loathing.)

We had several ideas as to how to accomplish this goal of making the teaching more interactive. First, though, we had to realize that going all-out and riding the leading edge of church innovation probably wouldn't work in small-town Missouri. With some exceptions, the fashions, language, and lifestyle of our town stays about two or three years behind what's going on even in nearby Kansas City, not to mention on the coasts. Very few people in this town are probably ready to come to a worship service where the venue is covered in modern art and the scent of incense fills the air and they're handed a piece of art charcoal and told to express their feelings on the atonement by creating spontaneously on a long roll of parchment.

One idea we've seen elsewhere that we really like is to enable questions and feedback by putting a text-messaging code on the screen that people can text questions to. Then the speaker or a panel can respond to those questions at the end. The problem with this service is that it costs around $50-80 per month. We think it's cool, but we're sorta running this thing on a shoestring budget right now. Also, some of the staff have wondered out loud (and probably justifiably) if getting people started texting during the service is actually going to end up being counterproductive to what we're trying to do.

So we've ended up with a fairly easy-going atmosphere, occasional random elements added to the service like Q&A sessions, people who come and tell their story, drama, video, and other things. We're looking for ideas that are creative, without being so weird that people in this town run screaming in terror.

Your thoughts? What have you seen elsewhere that seemed to work well?

EDIT: Also, this week's theme (as part of the "God, I Have Questions!" series) is "Is Hell Real?" We want to present this not as a scare tactic, but as accurately diagnosing the danger... Kind of a "No one has to go to hell - you have to reject Jesus' forgiveness to do that. But if we believe it's real, shouldn't we be honest about trying to make sure people don't go there? Even though it is an inconvenient truth?" (Pardon me for that last...)

Ideas for something interactive or different to communicate this without screaming and such? (And no, I don't want to do a "human video" that starts with a pretty teenage girl who gets attacked by demons who make her drink and then the Jesus character comes in and beats up the demons and saves the pretty girl.)

Filling the Hours

There's a line from Oceans Eleven that I love. Daniel Ocean, played by George Clooney, is talking about assembling the team for a heist. He comments on the "Mormon twins," saying, "I got the sense they're having trouble filling the hours." This is followed by a scene showing the twins racing a monster truck against a remote-controlled miniature version of the same truck and arguing like ten-year-olds.

This week, Cindy and I don't have every waking hour spoken for, finally. This after several weeks in which "filling the hours" didn't require much in the way of effort at all. In the weeks leading up to Easter, we were heavily involved in several major projects.

The first was our church's Easter play, in which Cindy plays one of the two main narrator characters - Pontius Pilate's wife - and I play one Jesus of Nazareth (you may have heard of him). The rehearsals and set/tech work took the amount of time that these things always do.

The second major project was our church's new worship service. For several years, there have been two Sunday morning worship services - one at 8:30 am, and one at 10:45 am, with Sunday School classes between the two from 9:45 to 10:35. These two services are virtually identical in style and schedule. Last week, on the Sunday after Easter, we added a third Sunday morning worship service, running from 10:00 am to 11:10-ish. This new service is a different feel. The music is a different style (more guitar-driven and without an orchestra), the flow is different (the order of things shaken up often), and the look is entirely different. In fact, the venue is different. It's the Opera House Theater, a historic building in downtown El Dorado Springs that was completely refurbished a few years ago and is now a super-sweet movie theater with chandeliers and gold ceiling and lots of awesomeness. We worked out a deal with the theater owners that allowed us cheap rent in exchange for some cleaning and promises of being very very careful not to burn the place down or otherwise steal/kill/destroy. The approach is casual, and aimed at a target demographic of people who think cool old buildings and gold ceilings are neato. It's called MainStreet Worship.

So anyway, this required a TON of work and lots of prayer sessions, both personal and corporate, in which we had no difficulty whatever admitting our inadequacy for the task. All the groundwork leading up to the new service put a big load on the church staff. For example, Sunday school classes had to be analyzed, and in some cases moved to a new 11:15-noon time slot. If you've ever been around American Bible-belt evangelical churches, you know what a huge deal it is to change that. Also, the same message would be preached three times, by the same man, but the second of the three times would be in a different venue and different atmosphere. So the schedule is the main difficulty - Pastor Joe finishes teaching in the first service at 9:45, and has fifteen minutes to get to the theater for the start of the worship service there. No sweat. But then, depending on the way the MainStreet service is scheduled, he's sometimes finishing up there around 11:00 or 11:10. That means he rolls in to the 10:45 service about the time the music/announcements are wrapping up, and he's got to be ready to start speaking again, just minutes after finishing the message the second time. Fortunately the theater is just a bit over two miles from the church's Park Street location, and El Dorado Springs doesn't really struggle with traffic jams, so the commute is rarely a problem.

And then there were questions. What do we do for childcare at this new location? Should we recruit some "core members" for this new service? Can we change the aesthetic of the theater for worship in some simple, portable, yet powerful ways? How can we avoid just falling into the same old ruts in a new location?

So we kicked it off last week. And yesterday was the second one. I loved it. I hope the people who don't currently attend church who have come the last two Sundays liked it too. Most seemed to (but of course in this small town I'd be one of the last to hear any negative feedback, because negative feedback comes in round-about ways in this culture).

Then Saturday night, Cindy was one of the main sponsors for prom. She got drafted into that job a few years ago through no fault of her own, and stays in the job because she won't take my advice and do shoddy work to get out of being re-elected. She has to beg and plead and cajole to get enough helpers from the Junior Class (the official producers of the event) to get all the decoration/planning done. I hate prom. But since she has to be there, I help. And I watch all the worst parts of my memories of high school played out in front of me. And I see teenagers I care about getting way too much in the vein of a Britney Spears music video for my taste. (I'm going to be a very overprotective father, I'm afraid. I suspect my children will not be fans of me when they're teenagers.)

So three weekends in a row were the Easter play, MainStreet Worship's first iteration, and prom. We haven't had trouble filling the hours.

More on MainStreet worship in the next post. I hope you read that one and give me your feedback.

Sleep Talkin Man

Okay, so I just discovered this thanks to Kevin Allred. This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, but BE WARNED - his sleep-talking language is definitely obscene at times.

http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/

Awesomely Bad Church/Ministry Websites

So a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Oehring, who has been interning here this fall, found a church website with the most awesomely bad flash intro either of us had ever seen. You MUST check it out here (BUT make sure your speakers aren't up too high - they might explode from sheer awesomeness!):

http://www.evangelcathedral.net/

My favorite part is that after the glory beams launch into the sky around the church building and we're done with the intro, then the rock guitar kicks into its plaintive wail, and the pastor welcomes us to their "PPresence" on the web (a "P" plosive sound is a cardinal sin in recording).

Yesterday I was trying to find this site again to show it to someone, and couldn't remember what it was called. I googled for "church site flash intro" and it was in the second result - this. Careful - if you spend too long in that post you may never return from the awfulness. But I noticed that several in that list were designed by the same designer as Evangel Cathedral's, including this one:

http://www.iccm-1.org/

Another gem on this site is found after the intro is over by clicking on the "Founder and CEO" link on the left. The guy has "over one hundred best-selling books"?!?!? REALLY? Over a hundred? Best-selling by whose definition? I'm pretty sure Stephen flippin' King doesn't even have that many best-sellers. So why haven't I heard of this guy?

If you want lots more of the same, check out the designer's portfolio here. Especially scroll to the second page and watch the K & K Mime site intro. It doesn't even have a "skip" button! It actually just has a "replay" button! How... why... uh... eh?

I wish I could come up with some pithy summing-up paragraph here that makes a clever commentary on something. I think the Flash awesomeness was just too much for me though.

Umbrage

A useful website my dad showed me: www.umbrage.org

Make sure you read the FAQ.

The whole "keeping the Christ in Christmas" thing

Long ago I decided that I think it's phenomenally silly to protest or boycott businesses, organizations, etc. that call Christmas "Xmas" or just refer to it as "The Holidays." Well-meaning folks like the American Family Association have been in the forefront of the fight to force businesses to use the word "Christmas" for the past few years. I confess I fail to see the point of protests and boycotts on an issue like this. A time to remember the advent of the Savior of the Universe, and we're writing angry letters and signing petitions threatening boycotts.

Now let me make clear that I do oppose efforts in some circles to ban the use of the term "Christmas." Ridiculous. Losing the legal right to use the word in business or governmental circles would be highly annoying to me. But punishing businesses who use "Holidays" has long seemed silly and a misdirected concentration of energy badly needed elsewhere.

But though I've long thought that these well-meaning efforts were a bit silly, more recently I've decided it's more than silly. It's counterproductive and even injurious to Christians' representation of Christ to the world. The AFA article linked above refers to the "Christmas culture war" and compares a small-town municipal decision to remove a nativity scene from public property to the Taliban's removal of cultural symbols from Afghanistan. I'm thinking if I'm an outsider to this odd ghetto of American Christianity, I might originally think it a bit silly of the town's government to decide to remove the nativity scene, but my main reaction to this campaign as a whole would be, "Whoah, AFA. Calm down now." Dwain and others, I'm honestly eager to read your (likely much more erudite) comments if you have a few minutes to do so.

When I hear of this kind of thing I also think of a painful ride home from a certain Large-Scale Christian Youth Event which will remain unnamed.

I had taken my youth group to said event, mostly because their high production values were cool, and several of the students and I shared a fondness for the headlining band that was featured the second day of the event. Also, we had had generally positive experiences at other events sponsored by this organization. But at this particular event, the theme for the weekend was highly military. (Disclaimer here: I am very well aware that the Bible uses lots of militaristic language, but Paul makes very clear that our battle is NOT against flesh and blood. In other words, people aren't the enemy.) The speakers, drama, and all the graphics and promo stuff was all about how we are in a "culture war" in America. Apparently, according to the thrust of the weekend, if we win this culture war, American culture will be predominantly conservative Republican and Christian.

A couple more disclaimers. I'm fairly conservative and Republican, and Christian. And to their credit, this organization did place a heavy emphasis on mission work and compassion toward those less fortunate. But the "culture war" language did its damage. A girl who had gone with us (and I was very excited about it, because she was just coming clean from some serious addictions and other destructive patterns of behavior) who wasn't a Christian turned to me during one of the drama performances and said, "This is why no one likes Christians. You all see us as the enemy."

On the ride home, Randy Joe Bland and I spent the bulk of the two hours talking to this girl and basically trying to tell her how sorry we were for this misrepresentation of Christianity. After that ride I have enormous respect for Randy's ability to listen with compassion, his lack of defensiveness, and his wisdom and depth. (I know some of you are thinking, "RANDY?!? Riiiiight..." But that's because you've only seen his humorous side and his constant deceptive drowsiness.) I think we were successful in communicating to the girl in question how followers of Jesus really should be about compassion and selflessness rather than militancy against fellow human beings, but damage was undoubtedly done. The campaign to force "Christmas" on everyone does similar damage.

Instead of going on the offensive with legal action, boycotts, and nasty letters, wouldn't Christians' cause be better served by buying less junk at Christmas time and using that massive marketplace muscle to put a serious dent in some of the social ills at home and abroad? Instead of decorating the house with 300,000 tiny bulbs and fattening up the Christmas bonuses of execs at Target, why not finance a clean-water well in Africa, where cholera is a sweeping the continent yet again? You can even buy a goat for a family in Africa for $75. Instead of spending time and energy and legal muscle protesting a "Holiday" display, why not spend that valuable time and energy and legal muscle speaking up for those who cannot speak up for themselves?

If Christians want people to celebrate Christmas as Christmas, let's be a people who make the birth of Christ impossible NOT to celebrate.

To close this post, I'll say this. It's easy for me to sit here and whine about how I think some other Christians are a bunch of bumbling incompetents. Talk is cheap. I must confess that my own materialism is seriously out of control in many ways. Without going into specifics, I'll tell you that this Christmas I'm going to do some things to reduce my consuming and increase my contribution to stuff that really matters. Even if it's a bit painful.

I know the half-dozen or so of you that read my blog probably have some ideas for ways to make an impact. Two of you actually ARE a way to make an impact. Share your ideas below please.

-- Edit 11/11 - The AFA is calling for a new boycott. See story here. (I THINK this link works.)

-- Edit 12/16 - See this interesting article from Time about The Advent Conspiracy.